Summer 2000
Volume 26, Number 4

"Where did Hegel's idea of the relation between lordship and bondage originate?" ask the Hegel experts, repeatedly, referring to the famous metaphor of the "struggle to death" between the master and slave, which for Hegel provided the key to the unfolding of freedom in world history, and which he first elaborated in The Phenomenology of Mind, written in Jena in 1805-1806 (the first year of the Haitian nation's existence) and published in 1807 (the year of the British abolition of the slave trade). Where, indeed? The intellectual historians of German philosophy know only one place to look for the answer: the writings of other intellectuals. Perhaps it was Fichte, writes George Armstrong Kelly, although "the problem of lordship and bondage is essentially Platonic.1 Judith Shklar takes the common route of connecting Hegel's discussion to Aristotle. Otto Poggeler--and there is no finer name in German Hegel scholarship--says that the metaphor does not come from even the ancients, but is a totally "abstract" example.2 Only one scholar, Pierre-Franklin Tavar, has ever actually made the connection of Hegel and Haiti, basing his argument on evidence that Hegel read the French abolitionist, the Abbe Gregoire 3...But even Tavar deals with the later Hegel, after the master-slave dialectic had been conceived.4 No one has dared to suggest that the idea for the dialectic of lordship and bondage came to Hegel in Jena in the years 1803-5 from reading the press--journals and newspapers. And yet this selfsame Hegel, in this very Jena period during which the master-slave dialectic was first conceived, made the following notation:

Reading the newspaper in early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer. One orients one's attitude against the world and toward God [in one case], or toward that which the world is [in the other]. The former gives the same security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands.5

We are left with only two alternatives. Either Hegel was the blindest of all the blind philosophers of freedom in Enlightenment Europe, surpassing Locke and Rousseau by far in his ability to block out reality right in front of his nose (the print right in front of his nose at the breakfast table); or Hegel knew--knew about real slaves revolting successfully against real masters, and he elaborated his dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within this contemporary context.6

1. George Armstrong Kelly, "Notes on Hegel's 'Lordship and Bondage,'" in Hegel's Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentary, ed. John O'Neill (Albany, N.Y., 1996), p.260; hereafter abbreviated "N." Kelly insists that Hegel's writings have to be considered within "Hegel's own time," but it is a time of thought ("N," p. 272). He considers therefore the philosophical differences between Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: Fichte's thematic was the more general one of mutual recognition (a theme Hegel treated earlier), whereas in the master-slave dialectic "Hegel is defending a doctrine of original equality that is curiously and dangerously denied by Fichte" ("N," p. 269). Many interpreters choose to discuss Hegel on this point in terms of Fichte, thereby reducing the importance of Hegel's specific example of recognition, first introduced in 1803, the relationship of master and slave. See, for example, Robert R. Williams (who in turn follows Ludwig Siep): "The story of recognition is a story about Fichte and Hegel" (Robert R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition [Berkeley, 1997], p. 26).

2. See Judith N. Shklar, "Self-Sufficient Man: Dominion and Bondage," in Hegel's Dialetic of Desire and Recognition, pp. 289-303, and Otto Pöggeler, Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geists, 2d ed. (1973; Freiburg, 1993), pp.263-64.

3. See Pierre-Franklin Tavarès, "Hegel et l'abbß Grßgoire: Question noire et rßvolution française," in Rßvolutions aux colonies, pp. 155-73. The Abbß [Henri] Grßgoire was surely the most loyal supporter of Haiti among the French abolitionists. In 1808 he wrote De la littßrature des Nègres, which managed to circumvent Napolean's censorship on the subject "ingeniously" by ostensibly dealing with the literary efforts of blacks writing in French and English: "The book was mainly about African sociey, but in it Grßgoire also took the opportunity to praise the Dominguans Toussaint Louverture and Jean Kina (Who had led a revolt on Martinique) and to observe that, if Haiti was still politically unstable, this had also been true of France in the 1790s" ("HA," p. 117). Asked in the mid-1820s to accept a bishopric in Haiti, Grßgoire refused, disappointed with the conciliatory attitude of Haiti toward France when the Haitian President Boyer agreed to pay a huge indemnity to the former colonial planters in return for recognition; see "HA," p. 128.

4. I have yet to see Tavarès's original article, "Hegel et Haiti, ou le silence de Hegel sur Saint-Domingue" in the Port-au-Prince journal Chemins Critiques (March 1992). Nor have I read his doctoral dissertation, "Hegel, critique de l'Afrique (Doctorat, Paris-1, 1990). It appears that he deals predominantly with French rather than German sources and that he has not consulted contemporary journals. From the article I have seen, his conjecture seems to be that Hegel's concern for abolitionism came later, in the 1820s, and may have been a nostalgia for his early revolutionary dreams. Schüller, Die Deutsche Rezeption haitianischer Geschichte in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts , briefly mentions Hegel, but only his late writings (1820s), and does not suggest the direct influence I am arguing for here; nor does she suggest that Hegel read Minerva.

5. Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm friedrich Hegels Leben (1844; Darmstadt, 1977), p. 543. Note that this biography is still the canonical one for Hegel, hence its republication in 1977 (and again in 1998). Although philosophical accounts of Hegel's development have been numerous and other biographies do exist, it is astonishing that Hegel has found no modern biographer to replace Rosenkranz definitively. See, for example, Horst Althaus, Hegel und die heroischen Jahre der Philosophie: Eine Biographie (Munich, 1992). Although certain objects of Hegeliana have received microscopic analysis (the watermarks on his manuscript papers, for example), there are startling gaps in our knowledge of his life. There are multiple reasons for this unevenness, beginning with the fact that Hegel moved repeatedly (from Würtemberg to Tübingen, Bern, Frankfurt, Jena, Bamberg, Nürnberg, and Heidelberg) before settling in Berlin for the last decade of his life, and he himself disposed of many documents, including personal papers, before he died. His (legitimate) son Karl was responsible for the archive after his death and may have repressed some of the sources. (Hegel's illegitmate son Ludwig, conceived in Jena in 1806 when Hegel was writing The Phenomenology of Mind, died in 1831, the same year as his father, in Indonesia as a member of the Dutch merchant marines.)

6. The Phenomenology of Mind does not mention Haiti or Saint-Domingue, but it does not mention the French Revolution either, at points where the experts are in total agreement in reading the revolution into the text. Of Hegel's devotion to newspapers and journals we havbe abundant evidence, from his student days in Tübingen, when he followed the French revolutionary events, to the Frankfurt years in the late 1790s, when he read newspapers with pen in hand, to the 1810s and 1820s, when he recorded excerpts from the British Papers, the Edinburgh Review and Morning Chronicle... Immediately after finishing The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel left Jena for Bamberg to become himself editor of a daily newspaper, which foundered when Hegel was accused by the censors of disclosing the whereabouts of German troops (Hegel's defense was that he had taken this information from other, already published news sources.)